Pages

August 19, 2013

Facebook to test new mobile payment service
"We continue to have a great relationship with our payment processing partners, and this product is simply to test how we can help apps provide a simpler commerce experience," Randall said. But if Facebook scales out the program, it could become competitive with PayPal and other e-commerce businesses from an end user perspective, said Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research.

Why Are There No Jobs for Hadoop in the Federal Government?
A more likely reason is that government agencies have not fully embraced “big data” because government leaders still do not fully understand what it can do or how it can help them operate more efficiently. For example, text mining can be applied to financial fraud detection, research paper classification, student sentiment analysis and smarter search engines for all manner of government records, and machine learning can be used for decision support systems for healthcare,model generation for climate science, speech recognition for security and mobile data entry across agencies.

Commbank promises more tech innovation
"With the project now completed, we are focused on continuous innovation for the benefit of our customers," Narev said in the bank's 2013 financial report. "We believe we are still only at the start of our long-term effort to apply world-leading technology for the benefit of our customers." As proof of this claim, Narev pointed to the bank's real-time settlement and banking, mobile banking app Kaching — which has handled more than AU$9 billion in transaction to date — and its point-of-sale platform Pi, and devices Albert and Leo.

How to Support Mobile App Development in Your Organization
"I view this as the yin and the yang of mobile apps," says Roger Baker, chief strategy officer at Agilex, an IT solutions provider with an enterprise mobility specialization. "As a CIO, you really want to say to users, 'Yes, you can develop mobile apps.' But at the same time, you have a responsibility to control security, data access and data integrity—all the way up through the brand.

Research: What CEOs Really Want from Coaching
Blind spots are less obvious when things are going well. It is very easy for executives to become almost strictly inward looking, especially when they have been very successful. But these blind spots can become devastating when performance moves in the other direction. A good, neutral third party assessment is a clear reality check for executives.

4 Time Management Tips For The Chronically Overworked
These days, "overworked" is the new normal, and learning to manage your time wisely is the key to getting ahead in today's 24/7 work environment. The truth is, you won't ever have more hours in a day, or fewer tasks to fulfill, but if you master your time and use it efficiently, you'll feel less pressure and less overwhelmed. Suzana Simic, manager of career services at Computer Systems Institute, provides these four key time-management tips to help you tackle the daily grind.

UK Serious Fraud Office suffers biggest ever data breach
Similarly, this was also the case with the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, a government body roughly equivalent to the US Department of Justice. This week they admitted to sending a staggering 32,000 documents and hundreds of multimedia files related to a criminal investigation of the defense contractor BAE to the wrong people. The files came from over 50 different sources and even though the breach occurred last year, the SFO still hasn’t recovered all of the information.

New Technologies Map Human and Machines Relationships"In making the overriding theme of this year's Hype Cycle the evolving relationship between humans and machines, we encourage enterprises to look beyond the narrow perspective that only sees a future in which machines and computers replace humans. In fact, by observing how emerging technologies are being used by early adopters, there are actually three main trends at work. These are augmenting humans with technology

Companies Neglect Physical Threat in Cyberattacks"People will put their finger on a biometric fingerprint reader, but they're still willing to hold the door open for the guy behind them," says Dan Berger, president and chief executive of Redspin Inc., a cybersecurity firm. Physical intrusion is a threat companies have to guard against as U.S. regulators step up efforts to make companies guard against and possibly disclose attacks on their computer systems.

CIOs Rise Again on the Coattails of Cloud Computing, SaaS When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the chief information officer position were many and morbid. A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. And for a while as organizations, including Gartner, proclaimed that the marketing department would soon wield a bigger tech budget than the CIO, the predictions of the demise of the CIO’s role appeared prescient.

Quote for the day:"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." -- Andy Warhol